Did Twitter’s Removal of Government and
State-Affiliated Media Labels Empower State Actors?


Allison Koh



COMPTEXT
May 13, 2023

#TBT

“Unlike independent media, state-affiliated media frequently use their news coverage as a means to advance a political agenda. We believe that people have the right to know when a media account is affiliated directly or indirectly with a state actor” (Twitter, 2020).

Twitter’s Policy Changes in April 2023




March 29: ⬆️ engagement with prominent state media from China, Russia, Iran (Kann 2023)

April 6: “In the case of state-affiliated media entities, Twitter will not recommend or amplify accounts or their Tweets with these labels to people.”

April 12: NPR quits Twitter after being labeled as “state-affiliated media” (Folkenflik 2023)

April 21: Twitter removes all labels for “government” and “state-affiliated media”

Overarching Research Questions and Definitions


After Twitter’s removal of profile labels on April 21st, 2023…

  • …did engagement with state actors increase?
  • …did state actors change how they use the platform?


🔎📕 Definitions (Schafer 2019; Twitter 2020)

  • State actor: Any individual or entity connected to government or state-affiliated media
  • Government official: Key individuals/entities representing “voices of the nation state abroad”
  • State-affiliated media: Outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content

Hypotheses and Plans for Exploratory Analysis

Hypotheses 🔎

After Twitter officially removed labels from state actors’ accounts…

  • H1: …engagement (RTs/likes) ⬆️
  • H2: …the online activity of state actors changed.
    • Tweet volume ⬆️
    • Focus (coordination of messaging) ⬆️
  • Sub-hypotheses on whether these effects are more pronounced for state-affiliated media compared to government official/diplomat accounts.
    • Government accounts are official voices of the state
    • Plausible deniability regarding editorial independence for state-affiliated media

RQs for Exploratory Analysis 🌏

  • [How] does engagement with state actors vary across countries?
  • [How] does the online activity of state actors vary across countries?

Data

  • State actor accounts: Alliance for Securing Democracy’s Hamilton 2.0 Dashboard
    • 1,177 accounts linked to Chinese, Iranian, and Russian state actors
    • Proxy for accounts that had government and state-affiliated media labels
    • Verifying (some) labels via digital archives
  • Tweets: Twitter Academic API via twint CLI
    • Tweet timeline endpoint; limit to 3,200 tweets per account
    • Collected data from 1,038 accounts
      • ~75% government/diplomat accounts
      • ~25% state-affiliated media

Method


Dependent variables 📈

  • H1: Engagement with state actors ⬆️
    • DV1: Retweet volume
    • DV2: Like volume
  • H2: Online activity of state actors changes
    • DV3: Tweet volume
    • DV4: Focus
  • Modeling strategies TBD contingent on the data available

Measuring focus 👀

  • Focus measured as a function of topic diversity: % of unique words used for all topics (Dieng, Ruiz, and Blei 2020)
  • ⬆️ focus/⬇️ topic diversity
  • Process
    1. Translate tweets to English
    2. Run topic model(s)
    3. Measure topic diversity

Next Steps

Identifying potential data issues

  • Granularity of data
  • Some accounts (automatically?) delete tweets that are “too old”

Thank you!

koh@hertie-school.org

https://allisonkoh.github.io/

@allisonwkoh@mastodon.social🎓

@allisonwkoh@fosstodon.org📊

@allisonkoh_

Appendix

References

Dieng, Adji B., Francisco J. R. Ruiz, and David M. Blei. 2020. “Topic Modeling in Embedding Spaces.” Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 8 (December): 439–53. https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00325.
Folkenflik, David. 2023. NPR Quits Twitter After Being Falsely Labeled as ’State-Affiliated Media’.” NPR, April.
Kann, Alyssa. 2023. “State-Controlled Media Experience Sudden Twitter Gains After Unannounced Platform Policy Change.” DFRLab.
Schafer, Bret. 2019. “Hamilton 2.0 Methodology & FAQs.” Alliance For Securing Democracy.
Twitter. 2020. “New Labels for Government and State-Affiliated Media Accounts.” https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2020/new-labels-for-government-and-state-affiliated-media-accounts.